John Cloud

John Cloud is a senior writer at Time. He has won numerous awards, including a National Press Club prize in 2005 for political journalism and a GLAAD award for his story "The New Face of Gay Power." He covers health and social issues for the magazine and for Healthland. He is married and lives in New York City.

Articles from Contributor

No, you haven’t accidentally clicked on Tuned In. This is still Healthland, but it seems like a good place to look at the latest medical mysteries on the show House M.D., which I have watched since its debut six years ago.

An old cliché says time is money. A newer cliché, from Oliver Stone, says money never sleeps — which is essentially the same assessment as the older one. But why are we pretending there’s a contest here?

Psychologists and psychiatrists tend to hate each other. The reasons are historical: beginning even before Freud, psychologists held enormous power over the cultural imagination. The whole idea of psychiatry — an explicitly …

Had I been given a choice, I would have preferred being born into a species that doesn’t need as much social interaction as humans do. For instance, I like to believe, vainly, that I would have been a decent great white shark. …

What’s the first thing you do when you burn or cut one of your hands? You might think the answer is that you put it under a faucet or wrap a towel around it. But that’s actually not the first thing you do. The first thing is …

One of the most peculiar findings in obesity research is that exercise — even if vigorous and regular — doesn’t reliably lead to weight loss. The reason, as I wrote last year, has to do less with physiology than psychology: …

We barely know how to treat mental illnesses, so it’s difficult to figure out how to prevent them in the first place. But as I wrote at some length last year, research into stopping breakdowns before they occur has advanced …